T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

I was given this morsel of information by either Nick, Gary, or Ernie, my companions in the raft. All three were in their mid-twenties, wild-eyed and bearded, dressed in Norwegian sweaters, rain slickers, and knit skullcaps. They were aficionados of rock and roll, drugs, airplanes, and speedboats. They were also dangerous lunatics dedicated to thrusting themselves between the warheads of six-foot, quadri-barbed, explosive harpoons and the colossal rushing backs of panic-stricken whales.

At the moment, however, there were no whales to be seen. Living whales, at any rate. The carcasses of three sei whales trailed behind the rictus of a Russian factory ship, awaiting processing. A low cloud cover, purple-gray, raveled out from horizon to horizon like entrails on a butcher’s block, while the Russian ship loomed above us, its endless rust-streaked bows high as the Jersey palisades, the stony Slavic faces of the Russian seamen ranged along the rail like a string of peas. There were swells eight feet high. All around us the sea was pink with the blood of whales and sliced by the great black dorsal fins of what I at first took to be sharks. A moment later I watched a big grinning killer whale rush up out of the depths and tear a chunk of meat the size of a Holstein from one of the carcasses.

Nick was lighting his pipe. “Uh,” I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back to the ship?”

If he heard me, he gave no sign of it. He was muttering under his breath and jerking angrily at his knuckles. He took a long, slow hit from a tarnished flask, then glared up at the stoic Russian faces and collectively gave them the finger. “Murderers!” he shouted. “Cossack faggots!”

I was on assignment for one of the news magazines, and I’d managed to come up with some expense money from Audubon as well. The news magazine wanted action shots of the confrontation between the whalers and Nick, Gary, and Ernie; Audubon wanted some wide-angles of spouting whales for an article by some cetologist studying the lung capacity of the minke. I’d talked them into the assignment. Like a fool. For the past few years I’d been doing pretty well on the fashion circuit (I’d done some Junior Miss things for J. C. Penney and Bloomingdale’s and freelanced for some of the women’s magazines), but had begun to feel that I was missing something. Call it malaise, call it boredom. I was making a living, but what was I doing for the generations of mankind? Saving the whales — or at least doing my part in it — seemed a notch or two higher on the ethical scale than inflaming the lust of pubescent girls for snakeskin boots and fur collars. And what’s more, I was well equipped to do it, having begun my career as a naturalist.

That’s right: I too had my youthful illusions. I was just six months out of college when I did my study of the bearded tit for the National Geographic , and I was flushed with success and enthusiasm. The following year Wildlife sent me up the Xingu to record the intimate life of the capybara. I waded through swamps, wet to my waist, crouched behind blinds for days on end, my skin black with mosquitoes though I didn’t dare slap them for fear of spooking my quarry. I was bitten by three different species of arachnids. I contracted bilharziasis. It was then that I decided to trade in my telephoto lens and devote myself to photographing beautiful women with haunted eyes in clean, airy studios.

Nick was on his feet now, fighting for balance as the waves tossed our raft. “Up Brezhnev!” he shrieked, the cords in his neck tight as hawsers.

Suddenly one of the Russians reared back and threw something at us, something round and small. I watched its trajectory as it shot out over the high bow of the ship and arced gracefully for us. It landed with a rush of air and a violent elastic hiss like a dozen rubber bands snapping simultaneously. The missile turned out to be a grapefruit, frozen hard as a brick. It tore a hole through the floor of the raft.

After the rescue, I spent a few days in a hospital in Vancouver, then flew back to New York. Gary — or was it Ernie? — lost two toes. I took a nasty crack over the eyebrow that required nineteen stitches and made me look either rakish or depraved, depending on your point of view. The photos, for which I’d been given an advance, were still in the camera — about thirty fathoms down. Still, things wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the headaches. Headaches that began with a quick stab at something beneath the surface of the eye and then built with a steadily mounting pressure until the entire left side of my head felt like a helium balloon and I began to understand that I was no longer passionate on the subject of whales. After all, the only whales I’d managed to catch sight of were either dead, dying, or sprinting for their lives in a rush of foam. Where was the worth and beauty in that? And where, I wondered, was the affirmation these diluvian and mystical beasts were supposed to inject into my own depleted life?

The night I got in, Stephanie showed up at my apartment with a bottle of Appleton’s rum. We made piña coladas and love. There was affirmation in that. In the morning, 7:00 A.M., Harry Macey was at the door in a warm-up suit. He whistled at the stitching over my eye, compared me unfavorably wth Frankenstein’s monster, offered me a dried lemon peel, and sat down at the kitchen table. “All right,” he barked, “let’s have it — all the details. Currents, sightings, the Russian take — everything.” I reconstructed the trip for him over Red Zinger and granola, while he nodded and spooned, spooned and nodded, filing mental notes. But before I’d even got halfway he cut me off, jumped up from the table, and told me there was someone I just had to meet, right away, no arguments, a person I could really relate to.

I looked up from my granola, head throbbing. He was standing over me, shot through with energy, tugging at his ear, blowing the steam from his teacup, all but dancing. “I know you’re going to love him,” he said. “The man knows whales inside and out.”

Eyolf Holluson lived in a two-room apartment on East Twenty-sixth Street. He was eighty-six years old. We mounted the steps two at a time — alt five nights — and stood outside the door while Harry counted his heartbeats. “Forty-four a minute,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Nothing when you consider the lungfish, but not bad for a man of thirty-nine.” In the process, my own heart seemed to have migrated to my head, where it was pounding like a letterpress over my left eye.

A voice, high and nasal, shaken with vibrato, echoed from behind the door. “Harry?”

Harry answered in the affirmative, the voice indicated that the door was open, and we stepped into a darkened room lit only by flashing Christmas bulbs and smelling of corned beef and peppermint. On the far side of the room, lost in the folds of a massive, dun-colored armchair draped with layers of doily and antimacassar, sat Eyolf. Before him was a TV tray, and beyond that a color TV, pictures flashing, sound turned off.

“Eyolf,” Harry said, “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine — he’s come to talk about whales.”

The old man turned and squinted up at me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles, then turned back to the tray. “Oh yah,’ he said. ”Yust finishing up my breakfast.” He was eating corned beef, plum tomatoes from the can, dinner mints.

Harry prompted him. “Eyolf fished whales for fifty-seven years — first with the Norwegian fleet, and then, when they packed it in, with the Portuguese off the Canary Islands.”

“The old way,” Eyolf said, his mouth a stew of mint and tomato. “Oars and harpoons.”

We crossed the room and settled into a spongy loveseat that smelled of cat urine. Harry produced a pocket-sized tape recorder, flicked it on, and placed it on the TV tray beside the old man’s plate. Then he sank back into the loveseat, crossed his legs at the knee, and said, “Tell us about it, Eyolf. ”